This South Bank Show follows Brazil’s leading contemporary artist, Cildo Meireles on his personal journey, as he prepares for a major retrospective which opened at the Tate Modern. The film is seen uniquely through the eyes of the artist himself.
Meireles is a 60-year-old artist of brilliant ideas who creates powerful political works and enormous, all-enveloping installations which are made from domestic objects like balls, fences, gates, glass and furniture, and offers audience participation and involvement like no other working art today.
Gerald Fox’s South Bank Show films Meireles in his studio in his hometown Rio, as he goes about making a huge tower full of old, rewired radios called Babel, and sticks protest messages on coke bottles and banknotes which are then reintroduced into society as a form of political statement.
